July 28, 2008

I had a dream about my mother today. In it, I was visiting the house in New Jersey where we grew up. While I was talking to a neighbor (long dead but very natural and alive in the dream), I heard a familiar voice in the background. The voice was talking to me, sort of echoing what I was saying to the neighbor, and after a few seconds I realized it was Mom’s voice. It wasn’t Mom’s voice of recent years (fading in the last two, and pretty manic-depressive, alternating saccherin and psychosis, for the previous 10 or so), but Mom’s voice of THAT time, of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The voice was very close, so I looked around. Mom was on the lawn. She was wearing a long flowing bathrobe, the kind she always favored, and she looked as she had looked back then, pretty, happy, relaxed, with long dark wavy hair and smooth, soft, good-smelling skin. Not bitter or phobic or defensive as she became (or as I later saw her to be), but simple (as a child sees a mother), smiling, and radiating love. In the dream I said to myself, calmly and matter-of-factly, "But Mom is dead. This is only a vision of Mom, probably the result of my being here where I spent my childhood." I wasn’t aware that I was dreaming (as I am sometimes in my dreams) but I did know that Mom’s appearance was dreamlike.